Modesty blazing

For an introverted intellectual, Clive Hamilton gets into all kinds of trouble. His anti-materialist, pro-conservation views manage to alienate big business, the Howard Government, the ALP right and the socialist left. A recent study that he co-authored on youth, pornography and the internet managed to alienate his friends in the anti-censorship lobby.

As he says in his new book, Growth Fetish, "socialist revolutionaries had an easier task" than the critics of modern capitalism. The revolutionaries promised better material living standards, but Hamilton challenges the fundamentals of the way we live.

Hamilton, 50, is executive director of the progressive think tank The Australia Institute, which for 10 years has punched holes in the comfortable arguments of left and right. "If we only ever do things our friends like, what are we doing?" he says.

Mark Latham, firebrand of the NSW Labor right, derided him as the ultimate inner-city "basketweaver", who, from a position of middle-class comfort, urges the poor to get off the materialist treadmill.

On the other hand, business leaders recoiled when Hamilton organised a petition, signed by 250 leading economists, that called for Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. The petition undermined the Government's argument that Kyoto spelt economic doom.");document.write("

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Roger Beale, the head of the federal Department of the Environment, told an audience of business leaders: "You might not like what they [the institute] say, but you've got to take them seriously."

Even those who disagree with him consider Hamilton a man of integrity who thrives on ideas and enjoys spirited public debate. His knack for generating publicity sets him apart from inhabitants of the ivory tower. Column centimetres and radio sound bites matter a lot to him.

Primarily an environmental economist, his writings span topics from climate change policy to the genuine progress indicator, a rigorous alternative to gross domestic product as a measure of national progress.

As well, the institute, funded by the private philanthropic Poola Foundation in Melbourne, has published research on population ageing, corporate welfare and private health insurance. It has a budget of $450,000, four staff, 500 members and a supportive board.

At a time when the brave intellectual is rare, and academic dissent is muffled by government research contracts, Hamilton's is an independent, provocative voice.

In Growth Fetish, he examines in spirited style the emptiness of our consumer society, the pitfalls of economic growth, and the commoditisation of everyday life. The age of abundance, he writes, has failed to make people happy: "The social basis of discontent in modern society is not so much lack of income; it is loneliness, boredom, depression, alienation, self-doubt and the ill-health that goes with them."

It is not every day an economist rejects economic growth as a God-given good. Since he completed his doctoral thesis on the industrialisation of Korea, Hamilton has experienced a couple of life-changing epiphanies.

In 1990, standing atop Coronation Hill in Kakadu National Park with the Aboriginal owners of the land and the miners who wanted to dig it up, he became a greenie. "You could almost feel the spirituality of the land arising like heat from bitumen on a hot day. I felt this place had to be protected. It was a moral issue."

Later, in the remote heart of the Borneo jungle, watching the moon rise, he had another profound experience: "I suppose you could call it a religious experience." This time, he abandoned his atheism for a spiritualism that underpins his approach to life and to economics.

Throw in several years of Jungian self-analysis and a little Marxism, and Hamilton emerges complex, contrary and committed. "Environmentalism at its core is a desire to rediscover the enchantment of the world," he says. He wrote a book called The Mystic Economist, which caused raised eyebrows among his friends.

His own experiences - from the 30-year marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Janenne, to his rejection of the academic rat-race - have helped to shape the institute's research agenda.

In recent months, it has published on the "whingeing battlers" - Australia's middle class who, in Hamilton's view, erroneously complain about being hard-up; and on "down-shifters" - people who have sacrificed income for a simpler lifestyle. As well, the research paper on young people and internet pornography arose partly from his experiences as a father. Myra is now 21 and Miles 18.

It is perhaps typical of Hamilton that on an overnight visit to Sydney, from Canberra, he eschews an impersonal hotel for a charming bed-and-breakfast, tucked away in Glebe. Small is beautiful, even in 2003.

It is near the University of Sydney, where he was in the first batch of students to study political economy under Ted Wheelwright and Frank Stilwell in the mid-1970s. Earlier, at the Australian National University, he had studied maths, psychology and history, which, he says, "reflected my state of confusion at the time".

Hamilton is quietly spoken, serious-minded, meticulously dressed. Asked if his work reveals a strand of self-denial, and a killjoy attitude to the pleasures of consumer society, he says: "I am not anti-money and higher incomes. But if you are driven by them you have a problem. I am not arguing to destroy capitalism but to sideline it."

Hamilton worked briefly for Senator Arthur Gietzelt, numbers man for the ALP left. But, over the years, he has become a critic of what he calls the conservatism of the "old left". He believes affluence, not deprivation, is society's biggest problem. Unlike other defectors from the left, however, he is a trenchant critic of both economic rationalism and British Labour's "third way". In both theories, the economy assumes a life of its own, "like a law of nature, like evolution". It dominates life to the detriment of happiness, fulfilment and meaning.

This analysis, when first delivered to a meeting of surprised left-wing union officials last year, prompted a withering attack from Latham. In an article, titled Let them Eat Lentils, Latham wrote: "The purpose of left-wing politics must be to ensure that all Australians can access material goods - economic assets, decent incomes and the comforts of the consumer age."

Other critics detect a whiff of Calvinism in Hamilton's approach.

A rising level of affluence is a sign of progress, they say, and to define the limits beyond which lie decadence and unhappiness is wrong. But Hamilton was also inundated with messages of support. His challenge to reflect on the question: how should I live? rather than: what should I buy? has struck a chord.

Growing up in Canberra, the son of a mid-level public servant, Hamilton was old enough to be influenced by the anti-materialism of the hippy movement. Never a big consumer, he has struggled to free himself from the shackles of ambition. Hired by the right-wing economist Helen Hughes, who liked the maths in his Korean thesis, he worked for a while at the ANU's National Centre for Development Studies. Then he went to the Bureau of Industry Economics, and to Bob Hawke's Resource Assessment Commission.

Academia and the public service made him miserable, and this experience of the gap between happiness and career success started him thinking. At the same time, the power of right-wing think tanks - such as the Tasman Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs - in the battle over Coronation Hill spurred his determination to set up a progressive alternative.

The Australia Institute turns out an "effective piece of work" every three to four months. Hamilton is determined to have impact. He commissions Newspoll to do the quick field work that can take academics months, if not years. It is not rocket science, but academics agree he fills a gap between high-brow university research and public conversation. "Some people are confused about us," he says. "That's a good thing. The last thing I want is to be predictable."

Growth Fetish, by Clive Hamilton, is published by Allen & Unwin, $24.95.